are trapped at the mouth
of the Yukon River in Alaska
and weigh upwards of 1,900 pounds.
This particular specimen
— I am quoting —
was killed in the exploratory dynamiting
that went on in the summer of 1951
at Celilo Falls on the Columbia River.
I remember my father told me
a story then about three men he knew long ago in Oregon
who hooked what must have been the largest in the world.
So big, he said,
they fastened a team of horses
to it—the cable or chain, whatever
they were using for line —
and for a while, even the horses
were at a standstill.
I don’t remember much else —
maybe it got away
even then—just my father there beside me
leaning on his arms over the railing, staring, the two of us
staring up at that great dead fish,
and that marvelous story of his, all
surfacing, now and then.
Night Dampness
I am sick and tired of the river, the stars
that strew the sky, this heavy funereal silence.
To while away the time, I talk to my coachman, who
looks like an old man.… He tells me that this dark, forbidding river
abounds in sterlet, white salmon, eel-pout, pike, but there is no one
to catch the fish and no tackle to catch it with.
— ANTON CHEKHOV
“Across Siberia”
Another Mystery
That time I tagged along with my dad to the dry cleaners —
What’d I know then about Death? Dad comes out carrying
a black suit in a plastic bag. Hangs it up behind the back seat
of the old coupe and says, “This is the suit your grandpa
is going to leave the world in.” What on earth
could he be talking about? I wondered.
I touched the plastic, the slippery lapel of that coat
that was going away, along with my grandpa. Those days it was
just another mystery.
Then there was a long interval, a time in which relatives departed
this way and that, left and right. Then it was my dad’s turn.
I sat and watched him rise up in his own smoke. He didn’t own
a suit. So they dressed him gruesomely
in a cheap sports coat and tie,
for the occasion. Wired his lips
into a smile as if he wanted to reassure us, Don’t worry, it’s
not as bad as it looks. But we knew better. He was dead,
wasn’t he? What else could go wrong? (His eyelids
were sewn closed, too, so he wouldn’t have to witness
the frightful exhibit.) I touched
his hand. Cold. The cheek where a little stubble had
broken through along the jaw. Cold.
Today I reeled this clutter up from the depths.
Just an hour or so ago when I picked up my own suit
from the dry cleaners and hung it carefully behind the back seat.
I drove it home, opened the car door and
lifted it out into sunlight. I stood there a minute
in the road, my fingers crimped on the wire hanger. Then
tore a hole through the plastic to the other side. Took one of
the empty sleeves between my fingers and held it —
the rough, palpable fabric.
I reached through to the other side.
IV
Return to Kraków in 1880
So I returned here from the big capitals,
To a town in a narrow valley under the cathedral hill
With royal tombs. To a square under the tower
And the shrill trumpet sounding noon, breaking
Its note in half because the Tartar arrow
Has once again struck the trumpeter.
And pigeons. And the garish kerchiefs of women selling flowers.
And groups chattering under the Gothic portico of the church.
My trunk of books arrived, this time for good.
What I know of my laborious life: it was lived.
Faces are paler in memory than on daguerreotypes.
I don’t need to write memos and letters every morning.
Others will take over, always with the same hope,
The one we know is senseless and devote our lives to.
My country will remain what it is, the backyard of empires,
Nursing its humiliation with provincial daydreams.
I leave for a morning walk tapping with my cane:
The places of old people are taken by new old people
And where the girls once strolled in their rustling skirts,
New ones are strolling, proud of their beauty.
And children trundle hoops for more than half a century.
In a basement a cobbler looks up from his bench,
A hunchback passes by with his inner lament,
Then a fashionable lady, a fat image of the deadly sins.
So the Earth endures, in every petty matter
And in the lives of men, irreversible.
And it seems a relief. To win? To lose?
What for, if the world will forget us anyway.
— CZESLAW MILOSZ
(translated by Milosz and Robert Hass)
Sunday Night
Make use of the things around you.
This light rain
Outside the window, for one.
This cigarette between my fingers,
These feet on the couch.
The faint sound of rock-and-roll,
The red Ferrari in my head.
The woman bumping
Drunkenly around in the kitchen…
Put it all in,
Make use.
The Painter & the Fish
All day he’d been working like a locomotive.
I mean he was painting, the brush strokes
coming like clockwork. Then he called
home. And that was that. That was all she
wrote. He shook like a leaf. He started
smoking again. He lay down and got back
up. Who could sleep if your woman sneered
and said time was running out? He drove
into town. But he didn’t go drinking.
No, he went walking. He walked past a mill
called “the mill.” Smell of fresh-cut
lumber, lights everywhere, men driving
jitneys and forklifts, driving themselves.
Lumber piled to the top of the warehouse,
the whine and groan of machinery. Easy
enough to recollect, he thought. He went
on, rain falling now, a soft rain that wants
to do its level best not to interfere
with anything and in return asks only
that it not be forgotten. The painter
turned up his collar and said to himself
he wouldn’t forget. He came to a lighted
building where, inside a room, men played
cards at a big table. A man wearing
a cap stood at the window and looked
out through the rain as he smoked
a pipe. That was an image he didn’t
want to forget either, but then
with his next thought he
shrugged. What was the point?
He walked on until he reached the jetty
with its rotten pilings. Rain fell
harder now. It hissed as it struck
the water. Lightning came and went.
Lightning broke across the sky
like memory, like revelation. Just
when he was at the point of despair,
a fish came up out of the dark
water under the jetty and then fell back
and then rose again in a flash
to stand on its tail and shake itself!
The painter could hardly credit
his eyes, or his ears! He’d just
had a sign—faith didn’t enter
into it. The painter’s mouth flew
open. By the time he’d reached home
he’d quit smoking and vowed never
to talk on the telephone again.
He put on his smock and picked up
his brush. He was ready to begin
again, but he didn’t know if one
canvas could hold it all. Never
mind. He’d carry it over
onto another canvas if he had to.
It was all or nothing. Lightning, water,
fish, cigarettes, cards, machinery,
the human heart, that old port.
Even the woman’s lips against
the receiver, even that.
The curl of her lip.
At Noon
You are served “duck soup” and nothing more. But you
can hardly swallow this broth; it is a turbid liquid
in which bits of wild duck and guts
imperfectly cleaned are swimming.…
It is far from tasty.
— ANTON CHEKHOV
“Across Siberia”
Artaud
Among the hieroglyphs, the masks, the unfinished poems,
the spectacle unfolds: Antonin et son double.
They are at work now, calling up the old demons.
The enchantments, etc. The tall, scarred-looking
one at the desk, the one with the cigarette and
no teeth to speak of, is prone to
boldness, to a certain excess
in speech, in gesture. The other is cautious,
watches carefully his opportunity, is effacing even. But
at certain moments still hints broadly, impatiently
of his necessarily arrogant existence.
Antonin, sure enough, there are no more masterpieces.
But your hands trembled as you said it,
and behind every curtain there is always, as you
knew, a rustling.
Caution
Trying to write a poem while it was still dark out,
he had the unmistakable feeling he was being watched.
Laid down the pen and looked around. In a minute,
he got up and moved through the rooms of his house.
He checked the closets. Nothing, of course.
Still, he wasn’t taking any chances.
He turned off the lamps and sat in the dark.
Smoking his pipe until the feeling had passed
and it grew light out. He looked down
at the white paper before him. Then got up
and made the rounds of his house once more.
The sound of his breathing accompanying him.
Otherwise nothing. Obviously.
Nothing.
One More
He arose early, the morning tinged with excitement,
eager to be at his desk. He had toast and eggs, cigarettes
and coffee, musing all the while on the work ahead, the hard
path through the forest. The wind blew clouds across
the sky, rattling the leaves that remained on the branches
outside his window. Another few days for them and they’d
be gone, those leaves. There was a poem there, maybe;
he’d have to give it some thought. He went to
his desk, hesitated for a long moment, and then made
what proved to be the most important decision
he’d make all day, something his entire flawed life
had prepared him for. He pushed aside the folder of poems —
one poem in particular still held him in its grip after
a restless night’s sleep. (But, really, what’s one more, or
less? So what? The work would keep for a while yet,
wouldn’t it?) He had the whole wide day opening before him.
Better to clear his decks first. He’d deal with a few items
of business, even some family matters he’d let go far
too long. So he got cracking. He worked hard all day—love
and hate getting into it, a little compassion (very little), some
fellow-feeling, even despair and joy.
There were occasional flashes of anger rising, then
subsiding, as he wrote letters, saying “yes” or “no” or “it
depends”—explaining why, or why not, to people out there
at the margin of his life or people he’d never seen and never
would see. Did they matter? Did they give a damn?
Some did. He took some calls too, and made some others, which
in turn created the need to make a few more. So-and-so, being
unable to talk now, promised to call back next day.
Toward evening, worn out and clearly (but mistakenly, of course)
feeling he’d done something resembling an honest day’s work,
he stopped to take inventory and note the couple of
phone calls he’d have to make next morning if
he wanted to stay abreast of things, if he didn’t want to
write still more letters, which he didn’t. By now,
it occurred to him, he was sick of all business, but he went on
in this fashion, finishing one last letter that should have been
answered weeks ago. Then he looked up. It was nearly dark outside.
The wind had laid. And the trees—they were still now, nearly
stripped of their leaves. But, finally, his desk was clear,
if he didn’t count that folder of poems he was
uneasy just to look at. He put the folder in a drawer, out
of sight. That was a good place for it, it was safe there and
he’d know just where to go to lay his hands on it when he
felt like it. Tomorrow! He’d done everything he could do
today. There were still those few calls he’d have to make,
and he forgot who was supposed to call him, and there were a
few notes he was required to send due to a few of the calls,
but he had it made now, didn’t he? He was out of the woods.
He could call today a day. He’d done what he had to do.
What his duty told him he should do. He’d fulfilled his sense of
obligation and hadn’t disappointed anybody.
But at that moment, sitting there in front of his tidy desk,
he was vaguely nagged by the memory of a poem he’d wanted
to write that morning, and there was that other poem
he hadn’t gotten back to either.
So there it is. Nothing much else needs be said, really. What
can be said for a man who chooses to blab on the phone
all day, or else write stupid letters
while he lets his poems go unattended and uncared for,
abandoned —
or worse, unattempted. This man doesn’t deserve poems
and they shouldn’t be given to him in any form.
His poems, should he ever produce any more,
ought to be eaten by mice.
At the Bird Market
There is no deceiving the bird-fancier. He sees and
understands his bird from a distance. “There is no relying on
that bird,” a fancier will say,
looking into a siskin’s beak, and counting the feathers
on its tail. “He sings now, it’s true, but what
of that? I sing in company too. No, my boy, shout, sing
to me without company; sing in solitude, if
you can.… Give me
the quiet one!”
— ANTON CHEKHOV
“The Bird Market”
His Bathrobe Pockets Stuffed with Notes
Talking about her brother, Morris, Tess said:
“The night always catches him. He never
believes it’s coming.”
That time I broke a tooth on barbecued ribs.
I was drunk. We were all drunk.
The early sixteenth-century Belgian painter called,
for want of his real name,
“The Master of the Embroidered Leaf.”
Begin the novel with the young married couple
getting lost in the woods, just after the picnic.
Those dead birds on the porch when I opened up
the house after being away for three months.
The policeman whose nails were bitten to the quick.
Aunt Lola, the shoplifter, rolled her own dad
and other drunks as well.
Dinner at Doug and Amy’s. Steve ranting, as usual,
about Bob Dylan, the Vietnam War, granulated sugar,
silver mines in Colorado. And, as usual, just
as we sit down the phone rings and is passed around
the table so everyone can say something. (It’s Jerry.)
The food grows cold. No one is hungry anyway.
“We’ve sustained damage, but we’re still able
to maneuver.” Spock to Captain Kirk.
Remember Haydn’s 104 symphonies. Not all of them
were great. But there were 104 of them.
The rabbi I met on the plane that time who gave me comfort
just after my marriage had broken up for good.
Chris’s story about going to an AA meeting where
a well-to-do family comes in—“freaked out,”
her words—because they’ve just been robbed at gunpoint.
Three men and a woman in wet suits. The door to their
motel room is open and they are watching TV.
“I am disbanding the fleet and sending it back
to Macedonian shores.”
Richard Burton
Alexander the Great
Don’t forget when the phone was off the hook
all day, every day.
The bill collector (in Victoria, B.C.) who asks